I went down to Reid Hillview airport this evening for some spin training in an acrobatic airplane. This is where you intentially put the airplane into a spin (more or less a straight-down spiral type of motion) and let it develop for a bit, before you try to get out of it (the point of the training). During the spin you accelerate from the roughly 40 knots of airspeed when the stall occurs to about 150 knots as you pull out of the spin a few hundred feet down a few seconds later. Its quite a rush.

It was good to do it and pretty fun even if it was a bit upsetting to the stomach. The Citabria (tailwheel acrobatic airplane) we were in was pretty different from the Cessna 172 that I usually fly. It was harder to keep coordinated (partially since it had an actual stick and not a yoke, and partially because the cessna is designed to be rock-solid stable) and it was missing half the instruments on the panel so it was harder to double check visual references against the instruments, which was a little disconcerting even as the instructor laughed at me for thinking so.

For fun, we also did a roll and a loop, since, hey we were in an acrobatic airplane. These didn't make me quite as ill as the spins.